A study of automatic separation and recognition for overlapped fingerprints

This paper presents an improved fingerprint recognition system for overlapping fingerprint of two fingers. The developed system can automatically and precisely separate an overlapping fingerprint into two areas, an overlapping area and a non-overlapping area, by analyzing their orientation fields and complicities. A method being able to remove a misjudging core of the fingerprint from the overlapping area is also proposed in this paper. Moreover, a recursive correction algorithm and a restrictions relaxation labeling algorithm are applied to separate two fingerprints from the determined overlapping fingerprint area, and the Gabor filter is applied to enhance figure quality of the two separated fingerprints. After that, the VeriFinger 6.2 SDK is used to identify the fingerprints. In the experiments, our system uses the fingerprints from the two public databases. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) and Cumulative Match Characteristic (CMC), are used to examine the proposed fingerprint recognition system. The average recognition rate of our system is 85.7%. The experiments results show the effectiveness of the proposed system.